French Prison Officers’ Legal Socialisation: ‘The Law, Yes, Prisoners’ Rights, No’

Since the 1990s, French prison staff, and notably prison officers, have been confronted with the slow but significant evolution of prisoners’ rights, prompting a transformation of their professional practices, now better regulated by legal standards. Few French studies have focused on prison officers’ perception of these developments, although a minority (Guilbaud, La socialisation professionnelle des surveillants de prison 1993–2018: Une perspective longitudinale, quantitative et qualitative, Université de Picardie Jules Verne, 2020) has revealed the existence of low level of legalism. To date, no study has referred to the legitimacy of justice and legal socialisation theories, in spite of their relevance for understanding of how prison officers internalise legal norms and the necessity to comply with them. This chapter undertakes this original approach by drawing upon nineteen semi-structured interviews with experienced officers in a high-security prison and by using appreciative inquiry techniques. The results show the weakness, or even the absence, of legal socialisation in our sample, and the use of various neutralisation techniques (Sykes and Matza, American Sociological Review 22:664–670, 1957), bringing their attitude closer to that of the antisocial population they are responsible for. Limitations are addressed and several explanations are proposed and discussed.